


static on a broken wire

by inamorata_jones



Category: The Blacklist (TV)
Genre: Crime families of choice, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-04
Updated: 2018-07-04
Packaged: 2019-06-05 11:59:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15170279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inamorata_jones/pseuds/inamorata_jones
Summary: In the car, listening to the wet rasp of his breathing and watching his blood bloom through the cream cloth of her scarf, she thinks: You do matter to me, you know. She doesn’t say it.(Or: Liz goes through her adolescent boundary-pushing phase fifteen years late, and then more or less forever. 2x18 - 2x19, and a conversation after.)





	static on a broken wire

By the time she’s facing Reddington on the sidewalk, listening to him admit that Tom, too, was just another one of his tactics, Liz almost has herself convinced she hates him.

He steps forward. “Can I explain?”

She steps back. “No.” Revulsion rises in her like panic. For a moment, she registers nothing except her own blind need to get _away_. “No, you cannot explain.”

Her hands shake, but she keeps her voice steady as she pulls the Fulcrum out of her bag and shoves it at him. “Here. This is all you wanted. Now you have it.”

It’s a relief, pretending their bizarre back-and-forth can be reduced to this. One last transaction: her information for his absence. The gifts he’s weighed her down with are trivial once she interprets them as means to an end. His baffling, half-expressed tenderness loses its force. And if she feels a twist of guilt and satisfaction at the way he winces when he sees how she’s tucked the file in a velvet-lined case like a gift of her own, if she notices the hitch in his voice when he tries to explain anyway, she doesn’t need to acknowledge those things, or what they might mean, just now.

When he makes no move to accept the file, she pushes past him, slams it down on the hood of his car. “Take it.”

“Lizzie,” he says, meaning: _be reasonable_. She ignores him.

“Lizzie.” There’s worry in his voice now, but she ignores that too. Soon, he won’t trouble her at all. The loathing she feels is beautifully uncomplicated, and she is almost, almost free of him.

 

 

The bullet to his lung undoes all that. In half a breath, her hate’s tied back up together with softer feelings she’d rather not consider. With something like contrition. Something like love. In the car, listening to the wet rasp of his breathing and watching his blood bloom through the cream cloth of her scarf, she thinks: _You do matter to me, you know_. She doesn’t say it.

Only a few of the moments that follow keep their shape: Gripping Reddington’s bloodied hand as he forces out _find Leonard Caul_ instead of the _I love you_ she suspects is there behind everything and doesn’t want to dwell on. Discovering drab little Mr. Kaplan is a dab hand at spur-of-the-moment murder, among other things. Standing in the still strangeness of the Bethesda apartment and seeing several versions of her own face looking out at her from the mantel, the walls. Playing the Fulcrum for the Director. “I never noticed it before,” the man says. “How much you look like your mother.” The threat is obvious, but the sense of it isn’t. She’ll ask Reddington, if he lives, she thinks distantly. Maybe he’ll deign to answer.

The rest of it – Tom’s posturing, Nik’s condescension, the tension at the Post Office, her own smothered panic – rolls over her like a wash of static, and has about as much meaning. By the end of the day, she’s the kind of tired that makes her feel like she’s six drinks in. She stumbles back to the motel of the week and collapses face down on the too-soft bed without even bothering to pry off her boots.

She’s clearer the next morning, but not necessarily better. The need she’d started with – to have all this, whatever it is, be over – is back in full force. That, and only that, she tells herself, is why she goes to see Reddington, who’s still tucked away in a corner of her ex-husband’s squat. Pure practicality, not relief or regret, makes her stay and listen when he starts in again on his “Lizzie, when I hired Tom Keen . . .” routine.

“Is that all of it?” she asks, when he’s finished.

His mouth twists. “Some of it.”

“You know, it wouldn’t kill you to lie to make someone feel good for once in your life,” she snaps, incandescently angry again, and walks away. She feels his eyes on her back all the way to the door.

She can't know yet that they’ll replay some version of this scenario another hundred times at least. She’ll turn a gun on him in a diner and watch him raise his empty hands to signal he’s no threat, then sit with him in a shipping container bound for Valencia and ask to be comforted. Whine that the bargain he’s made for her freedom isn’t good enough, then run across an empty street at 3:00 a.m. to throw her arms around his neck and whisper her gratitude. Ask him to attend her second wedding, then hiss she doesn’t want him there. Die to get away from him and resurrect herself to save him. One day, a decade or so from now, she'll stand in the kitchen of a little house in Italy and unthinkingly call him "ба́тя," trying to get his attention so she can ask him if he'd like more wine. Not "Dad," which means Sam, or "father," which refers to a man she doesn't remember, but a word she'll borrow from her mother's language and make his own. It will be one of the few times she sees him cry.

This time, she makes it two weeks before the impulse to mend things between them becomes too strong to dismiss, and she finds herself knocking on the door of his current safe house.

Dembe, when he answers, looks neither surprised nor unsurprised to see her. “Elizabeth.”

She’ll have to ask him sometime how he manages to maintain his perfect acceptance of everything that happens. It can’t be easy, working for Reddington. For now, all she says is, “Mr. Kaplan gave me the address. Is it okay if I . . .?”

He gestures her inside, not saying a word. The place is shabbier than most of Reddington’s bolt-holes, she notices; the hardwood is so weathered it’s going grey, and the furniture in the tiny living room, much of it upholstered in a lovely deep green, is badly faded in spots. As usual, though, there are shelves of books in several languages, and a record player on a cabinet in one corner. She would bet the stack of vinyl beside it is two-thirds jazz. Here, it’s all photographs on the walls. She recognizes a Brassai print of an empty street at night, and what she thinks is a Kertesz. What the choice of this place says about his state of mind, she isn't sure.

Dembe leads her to a glassed-in porch at the back of the house, where Reddington, propped up on a daybed, is dozing. She looks a question at the bodyguard.

“He’s fine. He had a little physio this morning. Between that and the painkiller, he wears out quickly.”

“Giving you much trouble?”

“No more than usual in these cases.” He squeezes her shoulder lightly, a touch meant to comfort, and recedes.

In sleep, the tics that ripple across Reddington’s face cease, and some of the lines smooth out, so that he seems . . . not peaceful, precisely – the life he leads has marked him too deeply for that – but as close to it as she’s ever seen him. Stripped of his armour – the vest, the fedora, the dumb little John Lennon glasses – he is disconcertingly _human_. She brushes a hand across his forehead, wincing when the touch wakes him.

“Sorry,” she half-whispers. “Go back to sleep.”

“Lizzie.” The smile he gives her is a soft thing. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

She looks out at the overgrown yard so she won't have to look at him. “I – figured you’d want time to recover. Mr. Kaplan’s been giving me updates,” she says lamely, as though asking someone else about him is as good as visiting. “And things have been kind of crazy at the Post Office.”

Whatever openness was in his face a second ago drops away, and he squares his shoulders against the pillows. “Is there a case? Something you need my help with? I’m not in a position to broker meetings at the moment, of course, but – “

“No, no. No case, Red. I just, I guess, I wanted to tell you – “

He raises his eyebrows. Waits.

She blows out a breath. “Look. I’m still . . . _incredibly_ angry with you. For Tom. And for not telling me anything except what’s convenient for you, and treating me like. Like I don’t even have a say in my own life. I can’t stand you a lot of the time, to be honest.”

The muscle in his jaw shudders. “That’s fair. Though I hope you understand it’s never my intent to deny you your agency.”

“But I’m – fond of you, too. Glad you’re all right.”

“It’s . . ." He swallows. "More than I merit.”

“And I wasn’t entirely fair to _you_ , either. About the Fulcrum. I do think you got close to me to get to it – “

“That isn’t – “

“But that’s not all there was to it, is it? You care for me, or you think you do, and you’re trying. So. I’m sorry.” She’s horrified to find tears starting, and blinks them back.

The sound he makes would be a laugh if not for the hurt in it. “Lizzie. The things you say to me. And you don’t even realize . . .”

 He tenses suddenly.

“Are you in pain? Should I get Dembe?”

“The Fulcrum, Lizzie. We have copies, but – Caul said you took the original. What did you do with it?”

“I, uh. Played it. For the Director.”

 He stares.

“They would have kept coming after you otherwise,” she says, feeling vaguely defensive, “and I didn’t know how many more abandoned warehouses Mr. Kaplan could turn into _field hospitals_ at a moment’s notice.”

 “Oh, sweetheart. You’ve made yourself a target now.”

 “That’s what he said. Oh, and something about my mother – I wanted to ask you – “

 His eyes close. “Your mother is not a subject I have the strength for today.”

 “But someday?” she asks, embarrassed by how childish she sounds.

 “Yes. Someday. I promise.”

 “Tell me one thing about her?”

 Silence.

“If I come again tomorrow?”

“Don’t try to manipulate me. You’re nowhere near good enough at it.”

“If I come again tomorrow,” she presses, “will you tell me one thing?”

Something – the fatigue or the morphine – keeps him from concealing his anxiety. “ _Will_ you come?”

“If you’d like me to,” she says gently, bending again to touch his cheek. He turns his head and presses his face into her palm like a cat.

“Yes, Lizzie,” he says after a moment, “I would like that very much.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Handsome Furs' "Radio Kaliningrad."


End file.
